Poetry for the earth / edited by Sara Dunn, with Alan Scholefield.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dunn, Sara.

Scholefield, Alan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nature--Poetry.

Nature.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

xxxv, 247 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fawcett Columbine, 1992, c1991.

Summary:

The poetic concern for nature has been, in the words of Anna Akhmatova, "wild in our breast for centuries." Now, Poetry for the Earth collects an astonishing diversity of poetic response to the environment, from eras and places as diverse as classical Greece, Elizabethan England, seventeenth-century Japan, contemporary Africa, and modern America. In moods that range from urgent to contemplative, euphoric to indignant

Even as these poets celebrate the vivid glories of the earth, their work is streaked with unease and fury. "Gold-empurpled autumn" and fierce leaping salmon give way to frosted marshes awaiting the ravage of war. London's sunlit mornings and haunting rain-slick nights contrast with the befouled rivers of Nicaragua and the noise and filth of ancient Rome.

From haiku and tribal riddles to blank verse, these poems speak anew to a relationship in crisis, propelling us all toward appreciation and reflection of the planet that gives us life.

Contents:

Celebration: 'So I shake with joy'

'The Very Leaves of the Acacia-Tree Are London' / Kathleen Raine 3

Fable of Fables / Nazim Hikmet 3

Dream Variation / Langston Hughes 5

Moved / Uvavnuk 6

from Song of Myself / Walt Whitman 6

from Scottish Scene / Hugh MacDiarmid 7

Steppe / Boris Pasternak 8

Low-Anchored Cloud / Henry Thoreau 10

from the Parliament of Fowls / Geoffrey Chaucer 10

The Garden / 'Abd Allah ibn al-Simak 11

Sacrament / Alden Nowlan 12

My Mississippi Spring / Margaret Walker 13

Spring in the Lowlands / Denise Levertov 13

For Robbie Moore / Olga Broumas 14

'Most Beautiful of Things' / Praxilla 14

'Repeat that, Repeat' / Gerard Manley Hopkins 15

Pleasant Sounds / John Clare 15

from the Task, Book I / William Cowper 16

from Epipsychidion / Percy Bysshe Shelley 17

'Leave Krete and Come to this Holy Temple' / Sappho 18

from Poly-Olbion, the First Song / Michael Drayton 19

Mount Saint Helens/Loowit: An Indian Woman's Song / Wendy Rose 20

'You Firmly Built Alps' / Friedrich Holderlin 21

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge / William Wordsworth 23

from Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Tees, Its Towns and Antiquities / Anne Wilson 23

A Paraphrase Upon the Tenth Epistle of the First Book of Horace / Abraham Cowley 25

Inversnaid / Gerard Manley Hopkins 26

from The Seasons, Winter / James Thomson 26

'Year's End' / Basho 27

A Bright Day / W. H. Davies 28

Loss: 'Lament for all that is purple like dusk'

Binsey Poplars / Gerard Manley Hopkins 31

The Song of the Wild Dove / Cassiano Ricardo 32

Temps Perdu / Dorothy Parker 32

Caption to a Landscape / Ahmad 'Abd al Mu'ti Hijazi 33

Dispossessed / Janice Gould 34

Biography for the Use of the Birds / Jorge Carrera Andrade 35

October Journey / Margaret Walker 36

from the Cambridge Songs / Anon [Medieval Latin] 39

Long Division: A Tribal History / Wendy Rose 40

The Tropics in New York / Claude McKay 41

Enclosure / John Clare 41

Pastoral I / Virgil 43

from Pastoralls, the Fourth Eglogue / Michael Drayton 45

Study of History / Adrienne Rich 46

Ephesos / Douris 47

Concerning the Flooding of Prague After Constant Rains / Elizabeth Weston 48

The Sea Eats the Land at Home / George Awoonor-Williams 49

The Mountain Stream / John Ceiriog Hughes 50

'Far Inland' / Anon [Innuit] 50

Loch Thom / W. S. Graham 51

Anger: 'A perpetual/sour October'

Ploughing the Roughlands / Helen Dunmore 55

'I Go from the Woods' / Wendell Berry 56

Alone in the Woods / Stevie Smith 57

Cutting a Track to Cardwell / Tom Murray 57

The Trees are Down / Charlotte Mew 58

To a Gentleman, on His Intending to Cut Down a Grove to Enlarge His Prospect / Elizabeth Carter 59

The Elm Decline / Norman Nicholson 61

from An Essay on Man / Alexander Pope 63

The Mower Against Gardens / Andrew Marvell 63

'I Love the English Country Scene' / Stevie Smith 64

Sheltered Garden / H. D. 65

from Padding It / Patrick Magill 67

from the Wonders of the Peake / Charles Cotton 67

Verses on Hearing that an Airy and Pleasant Situation, Near a Populous and Commercial Town, Was Surrounded with New Buildings / Maria Logan 68

New Ecology / Ernesto Cardenal 68

from Colebrook Dale / Anna Seward 71

A Song of Glasgow Town / Marion Bernstein 73

from Satire III / Juvenal 74

Sorrow Home / Margaret Walker 75

'Honeysuckle was the Saddest Odor of All, I Think' / Thadious M. Davis 76

Autumn on the Land / R. S. Thomas 78

Green Rock, Winthrop Bay / Sylvia Plath 78

After I Came Back from Iceland / Sheenagh Pugh 79

Celebration 1982 / Terri Meyette 80

Mikhael at Viksjon / Martyn Crucefix 81

Consolation: 'Moments of an azure hue'

Come Hither / John Clare 85

After the Winter / Claude McKay 86

The Lake Isle of Innisfree / W. B. Yeats 87

Speak of the North / Charlotte Bronte 88

Plash Mill, Under the Moor / Frances Bellerby 88

Early Spring / Rainer Maria Rilke 89

Tashkent Breaks into Blossom / Anna Akhmatova 90

'Everything is Plundered ...' / Anna Akhmatova 91

Beyond Time / Mieczyslaw Jastrun 91

Delight in Nature / Anon [Innuit] 92

On the Grasshopper and Cricket / John Keats 93

from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage / Byron 93

Heirloom / Kathleen Raine 95

Kopis'taya / Paula Gunn Allen 96

Granite Call / Joyce Isabel Lee 98

The Marl Pits / Charles Tomlinson 99

Stone Fish Lake / Yuan Chieh 99

Trees be Company / William Barnes 100

'Thrise Happie Hee, Who by some Shadie Grove' / William Drummond 102

from Paradise Lost, Book IV / John Milton 102

A Summer's Wish / Mary Leapor 103

Autumn Burns Me / Lenrie Peters 104

Within the Circuit of this Plodding Life / Henry Thoreau 105

The Soaking / Ivor Gurney 106

Digging / Edward Thomas 107

Planting Bamboos / Po Chu-I 108

'Lounge in the Shade of the Luxuriant Laurel's' / Anyte 108

Contemplation: 'How can you realise the wideness of the world?'

The Rose / Theodore Roethke 111

Coast Range / Pat Lowther 115

Having Climbed to the Topmost Peak of the Incense-Burner Mountain / Po Chu-I 117

Above the Oxbow / Sylvia Plath 118

Lesson VI, Lesson X / Elizabeth Bishop 120

Dry River / Rosemary Dobson 121

So which is the Truth? / Molly Holden 122

Inner / Liz Lochhead 123

Oh Earth, wait for Me / Pablo Neruda 127

"'Nature" is what We See' / Emily Dickinson 128

Epir Rhema / Goethe 128

Connections / Rose Flint 129

A Nocturnal Reverie / Anne Finch 129

Wild Peaches / Elinor Wylie 131

Sunart / Gillian Allnut 133

Hamatreya / Ralph Waldo Emerson 134

From the Sound of the Wind that is Blowing / J. Kitchener Davies 136

At Stoke / Charles Tomlinson 138

Advice / Czeslaw Milosz 138

The Reedbeds of the Hackensack / Amy Clampitt 139

Pieces of Unprofitable Land / Molly Holden 140

Pause / Mary Ursula Bethell 141

Geography 2 / Sheenagh Pugh 142

On Sight / Alice Walker 142

The Black Finger / Angelina Weld Grimke 143

Rural Reflections / Adrienne Rich 143

Lachesis Lapponica / Hans Magnus Enzensberger 144

Two Campers in Cloud Country / Sylvia Plath 147

This Solitude of Cataracts / Wallace Stevens 148

Observation: 'Sensitive to the millionth of a flicker'

The Waters of Lung-T'ou / Hsu Ling 151

Signs and Signals / Norman MacCaig 151

The Gum Forest, from Four Gaelic Poems / Les A. Murray 152

'Blazing in Gold' / Emily Dickinson 153

Ibadan / John Pepper Clark 154

Morning Sea / C. P. Cavafy 154

Land-Schap Between Two Hills / Eldred Revett 154

Concrete Poem 240663 / dsh 156

The Bight / Elizabeth Bishop 157

Whale at Twilight / Elizabeth Coatsworth 158

Night and Morning / R. S. Thomas 158

The Night in Isla Negra / Pablo Neruda 159

from March '79 / Tomas Transtromer 159

What Frank, Martha and I know about the Desert / Alice Sadongei 160

Riddles / Anon [Yoruba] 161

'The Day Breaks' / Anon [Mudbara] 162

Robles, M'Hija, Robles! / Rosario Morales 162

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River / Robert Bly 163

The Trail is not a Trail / Gary Snyder 164

Roadside / Olga Broumas 165

The Road at Frosses / Seamus Heaney 165

'As Imper Ceptibly as Grief' / Emily Dickinson 166

The Nomads / Laury Wells 167

Nocturne / Edith Sodergran 167

The Sky / Anon [Ewe] 168

Disquiet: 'Something warns me everywhere'

The Power Source / Ruth Fainlight 171

Neighbours / Gillian Clarke 172

Permafrost / Helen Dunmore 173

'Distance Collapsed in Rubble' / Anna Akhmatova 175

Augury / Seamus Heaney 175

St John River / Alden Nowlan 176

A Dream of Water / Michael Hamburger 176

What the Pool Said, on Midsummer's Day / Liz Lochhead 178

The River God / Stevie Smith 180

Rising Damp / U.

A. Fanthorpe 181

The Reason Why I am Afraid Even Though I am a Fisherman / Ray A. Young Bear 183

The River / Raymond Carver 184

The Fear / Andrew Young 185

Winter Woods / Frances Horovitz 185

Walking in Autumn / Frances Horovitz 186

Out of Time / Stevie Smith 187

'There's A Certain Slant of Light' / Emily Dickinson 188

Over Heard Over S. E. Asia / Denise Levertov 189

Open Spaces / Antoni Malczewski 189

Twilight View / W. S. Rendra 190

From in Parenthesis / David Jones 191

The Field / Ruth Fainlight 192

We Are Entitled to Love Autumn / Mahmud Darwish 193

Today's Meditation / Antonio Machado 194

One of These Days / Hugh MacDiarmid 195

The Recital of Lost Cities / Lavinia Greenlaw 195

Domus Caedet Arborem / Charlotte Mew 196

From the City of Dreadful Night / James Thomson 197

Men in the City / Alfonsina Storni 198

A Holiday / Margaret Atwood 199

'Never Forget' / Issa 200

By the Cam / Elaine Feinstein 200

from The Poor of the Borough, Letter XXII, Peter Grimes / George Crabbe 201

Night-Time in Mid-Fall / Thomas Hardy 202

from Paradise Lost, Book II / John Milton 203

from the Seasons, Summer / James Thomson 205

The Dry Season / Kwesi Brew 205

Summer Storm (Circa 1916), and God's Grace / Robert Penn Warren 206

Jeremiah 4, 23-28 / King James Bible 207

And When Summer Comes to an End ... / Nina Cassian 208.

Notes:

Includes indexes.

ISBN:

0449905993

OCLC:

25661118